Spam is one of the banes of the internet. 🙁 Here are some quick tips for how to combat automated spam and human spam in Gravity forms submissions.

Combating automated spam:

1. Turn on the anti-spam honeypot located in the Advanced Form settings. Edit your form, go to Form Settings (hover over the title/description area and choose Edit), select the Advanced tab and check the Anti-Spam Honeypot checkbox.
2. Take advantage of Gravity Form’s automatic support for Akismet.  Go to Gravity Forms Settings page to turn On or Off the Akismet integration. This option will only appear if you have the Akismet plugin installed and activated.
3. Use reCAPTCHA or the Really Simple Captcha plugin which adds additional captcha options to the Captcha field in Gravity Forms.

Combating human spam:

Unfortunately this is much much harder, because it is actual people that submit the forms and they can get around the methods above (although 2 – Akismet, can work quite well).

I’ve found a few things DO help reduce human spam:

1. For a mild case, try adding a message and a checkbox warning human spammers off. Here’s an example. <– this is my Dad’s site and he gets extremely cranky about spam (understandably). You may want to adjust the text for your own tone 😉
2. For an extreme case, you can try blacklisting certain keywords such as ‘optimization’ ‘outsource’ ‘long term relationship’ ‘SEO’… here’s a post describing this approach in more detail.

Let me know how you go, and any help you need.